A plane departing from the DC area heading to China was diverted back mid-flight after police were notified that a mom on board with her son had a one way ticket for the both of them and was allegedly planning to kidnap the child and not return to the US.
United Airlines pilots got a request from FBI agents asking them to flight back to Dulles International Airport. When the flight landed, agents arrested Wenjing Liu “under probably cause of international parental kidnapping.”
Lu, a Chinese citizen, married a Leesburg, Virginia man in 2007 with whom she bore one son. The couple divorced in 2013 but the custody arrangement states that “neither party could travel with the child outside the United States without written and notarized consent of the other party,”
Liu emailed her ex husband saying she was taking her son to visit her dying grandmother in China, the Washington Post reports. When the ex replied that the son would miss the start of the school year, Liu replied that the tickets were purchased and they were leaving immediately.
That is when he called the police.
The plane departed around noon and returned to Dulles at 5pm.
A friend of the blog who works at the US State Department’s division that deals with abductions tells us there are hundreds of cases annually where natives of foreign nations married to Americans kidnap their children without consent and carry them back to their country of origin.